You Need Them Both
We hope you’ve heard about “Paid Search” or PPC (pay per click) if your business relies on Web traffic. It’s one of the key ways to draw traffic to your site, and it works wonders when applied with SEO (search engine optimization). In other words, if you’re still using SEO as your only marketing avenue, you need to balance your marketing approach because your competitors may already have.
Not to say that SEO is not useful. The key is to not rely on it wholly, but instead to follow what several other successful Internet businesses are using—a mixed and complementary search engine marketing method. This style still makes use of the SEO way to rely on Internet spiders and carefully placed keywords. But it also accesses valuable paid search, online public relations, and other strategies.
This integrated approach—part organic, part planned—is what we’ll talk about here. Even after just this short article, you’ll be able to have a better understanding of how to send your online marketing into overdrive.
The key is that an integrated and varied approach can launch your business through the roof without a lot of wait time. On the other hand, this quick start, if managed properly, can be sustained, so that success is long-term. A careful balance of online marketing approaches can also be cost-effective, leading to a combination of high income and low costs. That’s a good combination.
The Style of SEO
Search engine optimization first came about as a response to Google, Yahoo, and other search engines, which use secret formulas and Internet “spiders” to rank sites for every search. Website designers and business owners figured out their own formulas to get their sites higher rankings in these search engines, using particular keywords in calculated frequency throughout a Website.
The end result of these higher rankings is that a site gets more hits. So our website, for instance, targets keywords like website Design Company. We use SEO so that people searching for “website Design Company” will find our Web site. Using similar keywords like web design company and keeping the theme throughout our site is one of the keys to ranking well. One of the biggest misconceptions of SEO is going after traffic only. Not targeting your keywords correctly can greatly decrease your conversion rate.
SEO works and it is still an important part of any Web marketing campaign. In fact, some experts claim that up to 60 percent of all clicks to a given Web site are attributable to SEO. More often than not, if your keywords are good, these clicks are highly valuable Web surfers, meaning buyers that are looking for exactly what you’re selling—even if that is just a matter of “selling” your brand. This success-rate is called “conversion.”
And the conversion rate can remain high because of its organic nature, meaning customers do not feel that they are being marketed to. They think the search engine just happened to send them your way.
Despite its high conversion rate, though, SEO has its downfalls. For one, this cannot be done by just anyone. It takes tons of research and must be handled by a company that can specialize in SEO It is highly specialized work to transform your Web page matter into keyword-dense SEO matter that’s still readable, and this can come at a large price, especially if you have a larger site. What’s more, you’ll have to wait on the return on investment. It can take from two to six months before you see any success on your conversion rate. Also, search engines are constantly evolving and changes take place all the time. Relying on an SEO only approach means you’re at the mercy of the search engines. If a change takes place and you suddenly find yourself on the 5th page your business can take a big hit. Finding a balanced approach and avoiding ‘putting all your eggs in one basket’ can help secure your business’s future.
Pay to Play
To counter these downsides of organic marketing, there’s paid placement. With paid placement, the formulas never change. Your ads always look when a Web surfer kinds in a given keyword. And you can guarantee yourself more coverage than your competitors simply by paying the search engine or other marketing vehicle more money.
You don’t have to start with a high bid, though, so the upfront costs of paid placement are far less than SEO. Plus, you can expect quick results. The problems, however, are that bidding wars between you and your competitors can get out of hand if you don’t keep an eye on the price of advertising. This means a possible high cost over the long run for paid placement. A frightening figure that drives this point home is the sheer amount of money already being paid for this form of marketing: $3 billion.
It makes sense, then, to use paid placement with SEO, not without it. Paid placement can come in handy while your SEO program is still in the works. Once your SEO is showing results you can find the right balance between paid ads and SEO to maximize quality hits on your site.
PR on Demand
A balance doesn’t mean flat, by the way. You can have a balance in your marketing campaign, while having your profits shoot straight up. One way to make sure that steady growth in your business is one of the newest kinds of Internet marketing, online PR. This can involve press releases, keyword-optimized character and how-to articles, branded blogs, and online reputation management.
Press releases in the traditional sense used to only be sent out to reporters and journalists. Now with press releases being online, anybody can read them — especially your customers. So this is just one more Web page out there that can be key worded and branded, to send your message, your goods, and your business to the offices and living rooms of your customers around the world.
Putting all of these together, of course, needs a “formula” of its own. It depends on your specific business and your specific customer, what proportions of each type of marketing must make up your overall strategy. But with the advent of paid advertising, SEO and online PR, at least your business has very good options to think about.
Ready to get started with an SEO campaign? More than just a Web Design Company, PSI is a Website Development Company because we offer complete solutions to help your online business succeed. See what Professional Solutions, Inc. can do for you! Call today at 1 (800) 211-7619 for your SEO proposal. We can even manage your PPC campaigns, write newsletters, and more.